Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agents

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 17 Apr 2026] Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agents Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Wei Qiu, Ziyuan Li, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He As LLM agents scale to long-horizon, multi-session deployments, efficiently managing accumulated experience becomes a critical bottleneck. Agent memory systems and agent skill discovery both address this challenge -- extracting reusable knowledge from interaction traces -- yet a citation analysis of 1,136 references across 22 primary papers reveals a cross-community citation rate below 1%. We propose the \emph{Experience Compression Spectrum}, a unifying framework that positions memory, skills, and rules as points along a single axis of increasing compression (5--20\times for episodic memory, 50--500\times for procedural skills, 1,000\times+ for declarative rules), directly reducing context consumption, retrieval latency, and compute overhead. Mapping 20+ systems onto this spectrum reveals that every system operates at a fixed, predetermined compression level -- none supports adaptive cross-level compression, a gap we term the \emph{missing diagonal}. We further show that specialization alone is insufficient -- both communities independently solve shared sub-problems without exchanging solutions -- that evaluation methods are tightly coupled to compression levels, that transferability increases with compression at the cost of specificity, and that knowledge lifecycle management remains largely neglected. We articulate open problems and design principles for scalable, full-spectrum agent learning systems. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2604.15877 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.15877v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15877 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Xing Zhang [view email] [v1] Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:26:25 UTC (32 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)